public relations

We’ve all seen those posts on Facebook of a kid holding a sign that says “If I get 1,000 likes, my dad will take me to Disneyland!” or something along those lines. These type of posts almost always reach the number of likes requested. Well, I wanted to see if we could make this kind of post work for libraries.

I grabbed a couple of coworkers, we made a sign, took the above photo, and then posted it via the library’s Facebook page. It has been our most successful post to date (we’ve been on Facebook for 3 years and I’ve been page admin for about a year). While we didn’t reach our goal of 1,000 likes, we did come close and over 7,000 people saw our post. That’s a lot of free publicity for our library!

Overall, this experiment reinforced a belief that I already held – that people are visual. If I had posted “Can we get 1000 likes for libraries?” as a text status, it would not have garnered the same amount of attention. Combining a visual post with text seems to work best for us and our patrons engage more with these kinds of posts.

I manage our library system’s Pinterest account and it can be very tricky at times. Days when I’m out of the office, instances when I want to fill a new board without inundating our followers’ dashboards with pins, or times when I want to pin an image from a website like Facebook: these situations can be problematic. So, I’ve been using two FREE tools that help solve these issues: Reachli and PinGraphy.

Reachli: This website allows you to create campaigns and then track their success. Install the bookmarklet and you’re ready to go. Reachli’s best feature is that it allows you to pin from Facebook (something that you can’t do with your Pinterest account alone). This is great for sharing Facebook events with your followers. Reachli also lets you change the source url while you’re pinning with their bookmarklet. For me, this is particularly handy because I have to open images in our catalog in order to pin them and then edit the pin to change the source url to the actual catalog entry. It can be a looooong process. With Reachli, I can just change it as I’m pinning. Bada bing, bada boom, I’m done! It is a super time-saver!

You can also pay to promote your pins, but I’m too cheap for that.

PinGraphy: This website is AWESOME because it lets you schedule pins! It makes me so happy. You can schedule pins for days when you’re on vacation, for certain times of day to maximize visibility, or pin a bunch of stuff and stretch out the time between pins. It is really annoying when I login to Pinterest and see a ton of pins from one user, like they just took a giant pin dump on my dash. Don’t be that person, use PinGraphy to schedule time inbetween those pins!

Pingraphy also syncs to your Pinterest account so you can view stats and analyze the success of your pins and boards. Love it!

ps. Pinstamatic is great, too! It lets you add a lot of great stuff: text, website snapshots, music, and more. Definitely worth giving a shot.

Update: 6/7/2013 – PinGraphy is no longer a free tool. At the moment, Reachli is working on a pin scheduling feature.

Update: 9/13/2013 – Reachli now has a scheduling feature. It is sweet.